The opposition parties have attacked Chief Minister Nitish Kumar led Janata Dal United (JD-U) for not taking a strong stand against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) after six JD-U MLAs jumped ship to the saffron party. CM Nitish Kumar had said that he will comment on the matter after meeting the MLAs who have joined the ruling BJP in Arunachal Pradesh.

Bihar JD-U chief Bashistha Narayan Singh said: “The matter of Arunachal Pradesh will be discussed in two-day national executive committee meeting currently underway at the party office in Patna.”

After this episode, JD-U is in a crisis-like situation with all possible chances of losing national status of the party. Apart from Bihar (43 MLAs), Arunachal Pradesh was the other state in the country where it had a significant number of MLAs.

It is to be noted that the JDU and the BJP are not allies in Arunachal Pradesh. The JDU provides outside support to the BJP government in the northeastern state. JDU secretary-general K.C. Tyagi expressed displeasure over the developments, saying the action by the BJP was “against the spirit of coalition politics.”

The Opposition parties in Bihar rubbed their hands with glee over the latest developments and predicted that the BJP would repeat the Arunachal feat in Bihar. “The JDU is completely finished due to Nitish Kumar’s wrong decision (to go with the BJP). It has destroyed itself. The party has started to break into pieces and very soon it would be wiped out in Bihar too,” Hasanpur MLA and RJD chief Lalu Prasad’s elder son Tej Pratap Yadav said.